TV News and Extreme Weather: Don't Mention Climate Change

Television news thrives on drama. Stories that can blend
danger and dramatic footage are much more likely to be considered
“newsworthy.”

So it’s no surprise that extreme weather plays a major
role in the network evening news broadcasts. “As we come on the air this
Friday night, millions of people are trying to drive home on sheets of
ice,” ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer (2/22/13) announced at the beginning of one broadcast.But
for the TV networks, weather events are most often discussed in
isolation: A new FAIR study shows that even when covering weather
events that scientists suggest are linked to climate change, the news
rarely mentions the changing climate.

FAIR looked at transcripts from the first nine months of 2013 of the CBS Evening News, ABC World News and NBC Nightly News,
scrutinizing all reports over 200 words that discussed extreme weather
events like hurricanes, drought, wildfires, floods and heat waves.

Of course, some weather events that are important enough
to make the national news do not necessarily call for a discussion of
human-caused global warming. While all weather today is a product of
climate change—if people hadn’t altered the climate, we would inevitably
be getting a different set of weather events—most meteorological
phenomena are of the sort that you would expect to find in an unaltered
world. Tornadoes would still hit Kansas and Florida would have
hurricanes even if no fossil fuels had ever been burned.

But much of the weather covered on the nightly news is
depicted as highly unusual: record breaking rainfall or heat waves,
storms of unprecedented ferocity and so on. As NBC’s Brian
Williams (1/28/13) introduced one segment: “Going to extremes—weather
whiplash across a huge part of our country.” Such aberrations call out
for explanations—and climate scientists say that they are the kinds of
events one can expect to encounter with increasing frequency in an
ever-warming world.

2013 was an active weather year in the United States: A
massive tornado in Oklahoma, deadly flooding in Colorado, a string of
major wildfires across several Western states and bouts of unseasonable
temperatures across the country.

That produced 450 segments about extreme weather—just 16
of which even mentioned climate change. In other words, 96 percent of
extreme weather stories never discussed the human impact on the climate.

On the CBS Evening News, FAIR counted 114 reports
about extreme weather. Only two of those reports mentioned the terms
“greenhouse gases,” “climate change” or “global warming.” In a segment
about flooding (5/2/13), the mayor of Fargo, North Dakota, commented:
“Is it climate change? I really don’t know.” That was that story’s
entire discussion of human-made climate change.

On ABC World News, eight reports mentioned
climate change. Though that figure represents only 4 percent of the
newscast’s 200 segments about extreme weather, ABC was somewhat
more direct when it did attribute weather outcomes to climate factors.
On a June 20 report on the unusually active fire season, correspondent
Clayton Sandell noted: “Climate experts blame extreme drought and global
temperatures running hotter than average every single month for 28
years straight.” Four days later, he made a similar point:

NBC Nightly News mentioned climate change six
times in 136 reports on extreme weather. Two segments dealt with climate
change in some detail—a January 8 segment about a new report on warming
from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a
September 27 report about the latest findings from the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. The other mentions were passing references, as
when NBC correspondent John Yang (5/25/13) observed: “Why all
this severe weather? Government scientists say it’s partly the result of
man-made climate change.”

The extent to which current weather events should be
linked to climate change is, of course, a matter of serious scientific
debate. But as Scientific American (6/11/11) put it:

So are the floods and spate of other recent extreme
events also examples of predictions turned into cold, hard reality?
Increasingly, the answer is yes. Scientists used to say, cautiously,
that extreme weather events were “consistent” with the predictions of
climate change. No more.

As Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research wrote (Climatic Change, 3/21/12):

The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event
is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All
weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in
which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.

It’s unrealistic to expect that TV newscasts would find a
way to mention climate change or a warming planet in every significant
story about extreme weather. But you’re unlikely to ever bring up global
warming if you don’t think that it’s real; CBS Evening News’ go-to “expert” on extreme weather in David Bernard, a meteorologist at a Florida CBS affiliate who also happens to be a climate change denier (FAIR Action Alert, 7/20/12).

During the study period, one of the most substantive reports on the CBS
newscast regarding climate change—one that did not reference extreme
weather—was a September 26 report built around the bogus notion of a
supposed “pause” in global warming (FAIR Blog, 10/1/13).

If news reports are failing to consistently discuss
climate change in the context of extreme weather, that’s not to say the
public does not make such links. Polling from the Yale Project on
Climate Change Communication (4/20/13)
has shown that a majority of the American public sees a link between
extreme weather and climate change. More reporting that connected these
dots could bolster public support for policies to address climate
change.

“Our climate is in the news tonight,” NBC Nightly News anchor
Brian Williams (1/8/13) announced at the opening of a segment about a
new scientific report on warming. But our study demonstrates that when
weather is the news, the climate is seldom mentioned. It’s almost as if
the climate and the weather were happening on two different planets.